There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.
–– Michel de Montaigne
American poet David
Schubert once wrote in a letter to fellow poet and friend Ben Belitt: “I’m
trying desperately to keep myself above ground and all in one. I have so many
notes, sentences, phrases, ideas, that they’d make a complete library of
several thousand volumes if I could ever do anything with any of them. I’m
afraid that I must sound like ‘a real village of sorrow,’ but it’s the
eloquence of the uninhabited” (Weiss,
209-210). Not entirely uninhabited, Schubert’s poetry has drawn fleeting praise
over the years from figures like Robert Frost, Louise Bogan, William Carlos
Williams, and Theodore Weiss. But it was John Ashbery who sparked a deeper
revival of interest in Schubert’s brief, turbulent life and mercurial body of
work—first in a 1983 essay for a collection celebrating the fortieth
anniversary of the Quarterly
Review of Literature, which featured writings by and about
Schubert; then in a Harvard lecture later collected in Other Traditions, where
Schubert appears as one of six overlooked poets; and also in an essay for The New York Review of Books. Ashbery
describes the poet’s compulsive note-taking: “He was a chronic chain smoker and
was always writing down fragments of poetry in the matchbooks he carried with
him, which he would later incorporate into poems” (“The Book That No One Knows”
7). He goes on to suggest that the “typical Schubert poem has the appearance of
being smashed, not too painstakingly put back together again, and finally
contemplated with both remorse and amusement.” Elsewhere, Ashbery claims such
qualities render the work “immune to critical analysis or even paraphrase”
(“Schubert’s Unfinished 309”). He likens Schubert’s poetry to “a complex,
dissonant, astringent musical chord. Analyze it and it falls apart, or at any
rate the analysis does.”
So far, then, neither
Ashbery’s nor Schubert’s own reflections offer much of an access point into a
deeper appreciation or understanding of the work. They read as
apologies—disclaimers, even—or, in Schubert’s case, morbid self-reproach.
Casting a wider net, art
critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl in a New York Times article “With Sweet
Abandon” claims that Schubert “shared with such of our lyrical ancestors as Thomas Wyatt and Robert Herrick a love
of poetic utterance bordering on lust” and that “in ‘conversational’ style, no
one had gone farther than Schubert or better knew the secret of it—an ambling
surface precisely registering deep movements and countermovements of thought.” Here,
Schjeldahl grants Schubert impressive territories, including the body (“lust”),
the intellect (“deep movements... of thought”), the social (“conversational”),
and implicitly much in between. He brings a reader to Schubert as to a kind of
immeasurable expanse of the human experience. His focus narrows only when
discussing Schubert’s early work, which he asserts is derivative of Hart Crane
and W.H. Auden.
In
a similar vein, author and critic David Galler complains that some of Schubert’s
novice poems are “cloaked in period nuances,” culminating in “a vision not
totally assimilated” (323). In Schubert’s later poems, however, Galler sees evidence
of a developmental progression. Now the poems are “cunning collages” where
“descriptive rhetoric, external projections of the self, have vanished” and
“Catullan fragments, rapid changes of focus, have taken over to express the
exact conditions of what, in earlier poems, was a diffuse loneliness.” Yet Galler seems to trade one species of vagueness
for another, and his phrase “exact
conditions” remains untethered. Summarizing Schubert’s most realised work he
describes “a poetry of raw, daily encounters that is jaunty with black bile,
grotesque with defeat, violent with innocence.” This quirky combination of
nouns and adjectives is perhaps evocative of certain unruly qualities in the
work—“jaunty with black bile”!— but fails to go much deeper. Once more, Ashbery
appears most prescient, pronouncing on Schubert’s poetry: “Analyze it
and it falls apart, or at any rate the analysis does.”
Dying,
as always, for the final word, Ron Silliman gripes that Ashbery should have
“located Schubert more clearly with three other modernist masters, Stevens
(whom Ashbery notes Schubert admired), Frost (who actually supported Schubert
financially for a time, and would have done so longer had not Schubert’s mental
illness intervened), and Stein, about whom Ashbery says nothing, but who in
many ways seems the modernist ‘most like’ Schubert.” This is useful perhaps in
terms of canonical taxonomy, but such ordering by precursors and likenesses inevitably
ignores what’s most unique, distinctively ‘new’ or significant about a work.
So,
in briefly surveying the critical literature, searching through “notes,
sentences, phrases, ideas,” on Schubert, we find nowhere near enough to “make a complete library of several
thousand volumes,” and while there are eloquent passages, there is little overall
coherence or constancy, other than a general complaint about a degree of
derivativeness lurking in some of the early poems. Schubert’s self-described “eloquence”
seems to remain not only “uninhabited,” but perhaps uninhabitable in terms of
posterity. As Schubert writes, in a poem titled “Another Poet Called David”: “I
stood in the utter darkness,/Cold. Without evidence of myself” (69).
To
force the moment to its crisis, I’ll quote Ashbery one more time: “How then
does one discuss Schubert, or more precisely, how does one talk about him to an
audience of whom few will likely have read his work?” (“The Book That No One
Knows” 4). He answers his own question
by quoting Rachel Hadas, who proclaims that “the truest and most helpful way to
praise him is not to jimmy his name into a Great Tradition. Instead we should
try to grasp and convey his most immediate and enduring legacy: the strange
originality of his poetry.” Schubert’s claim to fame? He’s
fame-resistant—impervious to the usual tools of evaluation, categorization, and
canonization.
But
before we get to his poetry, I’d like to focus briefly on Schubert’s life, not
to mount a psycho-biographical assault—not yet—but to provide a
little contextual atmosphere: David Schubert was born in 1913 in Brooklyn to
poor parents. His father soon abandoned the family, his mother committing
suicide quickly thereafter—and it is believed that a young Schubert may have discovered
her body. At the age of fifteen he found himself homeless, but later somehow managed
to receive a full scholarship to Amherst College, where one of his mentors was
Robert Frost. Despite Frost advocating on his behalf, Schubert was expelled for
his absenteeism, which was allegedly due to his pre-occupation with writing poetry
at the expense of most other aspects of his waking life. At the age of twenty,
he married a woman named Judith who supported his writing right up to the day mental
illness took over and Schubert arrived unannounced at a mental hospital in
Washington, D.C. asking “to see Archibald MacLeish about getting into the navy”
(Ashbery “The Book That No One Knows” 4). In addition to writing poetry, Schubert produced a novel which, after
being rejected and returned so often he referred to it as his “homing bird” (Bogan 210), Schubert finally destroyed. The only extant fragment is the
very first sentence of Chapter One: “Outside it was Tuesday” (2). In 1946,
Schubert died of tuberculosis at Central Islip, two years after being diagnosed
with paranoid schizophrenia and institutionalized.
Arguably, Schubert’s
short-lived existence might fit under the heading “tragic,” though such labels
are reductive. We are faced with the romantic temptation to resurrect his ‘strangely
original’ (Hadas) poems from the ashes of his life—to re-examine, if not
redeem, his legacy. There’s also the temptation to read the poetry through the
man—as the man, himself—and judge accordingly. All of which invites thorny
questions about biographical determinism and leads us back to our tragic
cul-de-sac. Schubert
laments something like this himself in a letter to Ben Belitt, where,
reflecting on Hart Crane, he confesses, “I
hate to feel that a poetry is so inextricably tied up with the tragedy of the
poet that it cannot lead its own life” (qtd. in Ashbery “The Book That No One Knows” 10). However, it is hard to
ignore the fact that Schubert’s work has never achieved full critical acclaim, and
by that narrow metric alone, might be deemed a failure—dead on arrival. As
Marjorie Perloff offhandedly remarked: “I can’t see the fuss over David
Schubert” (“(Un)Framing the Other Tradition” 113). So, for now, the sad
“tragic” label seems to want to stick.
Nevertheless, “tragic” will
serve as a useful segue into Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, where he argues that art
arises from the tension between two forces: Dionysian frenzy and Apollonian
restraint.
Bear with me.
According to Nietzsche,
Dionysus—god of wine, music, and ecstatic dissolution—embodies the primal force
of intoxication and rhythm that overwhelms the boundaries of the self,
dissolving individuality in a rapturous unity with nature, making the whole apparatus
of perception vibrate with potential. Apollo, by contrast, governs the realm of
dreams and appearances. As Nietzsche puts it, without Apollo, “the illusion…
deceive[s] us as crude reality” (The Birth of Tragedy 35); the Sun God
draws “that delicate line which the dream image may not cross so as to work its
effect pathologically.” Simply put, without Apollo’s clarifying restraint, art
tips into pathology; without Dionysian vitality, it risks becoming inert.
In this interplay of
dynamically interacting forces, I hear an echo of Wallace Stevens’ claim: “The
poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.” This very same quote
is one Ashbery uses to describe the limits of Schubert’s poetry, claiming “much
of Schubert’s poetry stretches that ‘almost’ almost to the snapping point”
(“The Book That No One Knows” 4).
If we were to superimpose
Nietzsche’s mythic binary onto Stevens’ axiom, “intelligence” easily becomes the
Apollonian force—an external pressure, from reader or critic, imposing order
and legibility. The poem’s resistance, then, would be its Dionysian fever:
intoxicating, boundary-dissolving, and necessary “to enhance the excitability
of the whole machine; else there is no art” (Nietzsche Twilight of
the Idols TI IX:8). As such, Stevens’ axiom can be seen as mirroring
the tension Nietzsche describes—between intelligibility and drunkenness, logic
and ecstasy, restraint and release. But now we must privilege the
“intelligence,” as Stevens does, even as it is resisted by the poem’s rowdy
energies—just as Schubert pushes the whole enterprise “almost to the snapping
point.” As Ashbery mentions, it is crucial not to overlook how much depends upon
Stevens’ “almost”— a qualification I’d like to use to subtly readjust Nietzsche’s
delicate equilibrium and synergistic
fusion of forces. In our new Stevensian configuration,
the extrinsic Apollonian force—reason, form, intelligibility—must ultimately prevail
over the Dionysian impulse to resist. (The poem must nearly elude understanding,
but not quite.) Its illusory, rapturous energy must eventually yield to sense—to
the Sun God’s coherence and light.
Conversely, as Ashbery
suggests, should the poem go beyond “the snapping point”—if it collapses
entirely into Dionysian excess—it risks unraveling altogether. Picture
Euripides’ Bacchants, driven mad, tearing Dionysus’s rival, King Pentheus, limb
from limb and we might glimpse Schubert’s
worst poems, blind, raging, mad.
Hopefully, this isn’t too
much of a reduction of Nietzsche’s theory so much as an expedient reapplication
of it, via Stevens, in order to wield a critically
useful tool with which to finally get at Schubert’s poetry.
But again, it is tempting
to indulge in a bit of literary psychoanalysis—reading Schubert himself, his
psyche—through Stevens, Nietzsche, and Greek mythology—while setting aside
clinical definitions of mental illness. We
might try to attribute Schubert’s ultimate unraveling to a Dionysian
predisposition—and his failure to restrain it—rather than to some neurochemical
defect, which would be unfair. Who knows, perhaps Schubert was thusly conflicted, his Dionysian intelligence-resisting side winning
out, as he crossed “that delicate line which the dream image may not cross so
as to work its effect pathologically.” But this is speculation. Indeed, the
poems reflect real aspects of Schubert’s life, but just because his life was
rife with disappointments, setbacks, and breakdowns, this shouldn’t confirm
that his art failed in the selfsame ways. Art and life are separate things, (un)fortunately.
And
while Schubert’s poems do grapple with the events and themes of his life’s
failures—and at times even seem to anticipate and incorporate them into their
design—I’ll argue that, unlike the failures of his life, the ostensible
failures of his art—the hallucinatory, fragmented, self-defeating, pseudo-sensical
contradictions—are, in certain poems at least, counterintuitively, a kind of
success. In other words, he proves Nietzsche and Stevens, and many of his
critics, at least partially wrong. Although let’s keep in mind, as Schubert
himself once wrote in a poem titled “No Title,” “how little space there is
between success and nothing at all” (70).
To
attempt a close reading of Schubert’s work is to flirt with confusion and
disappointment (in more than one way). As we’ve seen, his poems—deemed “immune
to critical analysis or even paraphrase” by the king of opacity himself—defy
categorization and resist easy consumption, leaving even illustrious poet-critics
adjusting their glasses and scratching their chins. Just as Archibald MacLeish
(Schubert’s hapless would-be naval sponsor) once wrote in his poem “Ars
Poetica”: “A poem should not mean / but be”—so does the “typical Schubert poem”
(Ashbery “The
Book That No One Knows” 7) embody this
enigma: it simply is—strangely, inexplicably.
So
let’s leave the typical Schubert poem (which I’d describe as a spiky
indeterminacy wrapped in a muffled mellifluousness, its form and movement
writhing as if suffering from some nameless, gnawing pain) “be,” while
sacrificing one of the runts of the litter—if only to test our Apollonian intelligence
and appease our curiosity (not to mention the ancient but still breathing gods
of New Criticism).
“No
Finis” appears on the last page of the one and only book Schubert ever
published, Initial A, which arrived two decades after his death in 1946. Unlike the “smashed, not too painstakingly
put back together” aesthetic, this poem is a-typically tightly wrought—even meticulous—yet retains
many of the poet’s signature visions, obsessions, and themes.
No
Finis
When you cannot go further
It is time to go back and wrest
Out of failure some
Thing shining.
As when a child I sat
On the stoop and spoke
The state licenses, the makes
Of autos going somewhere, ––
To others I leave this fleeting
Memory of myself.
(70)
The
poem is unassuming in its plainness—short lines, simple diction. The
conventional capitalization of each line’s first letter lends it an air of what
Charles Bernstein, years later, would call “official verse culture.” But
beneath the ordinary surface of this little verse, an oblivion swells—threatening
to consume reader, poem, and poet alike.
Right
away, the title “No Finis” announces paradox: negating closure even as the poem
marks the chronological end of Schubert’s literary career. The negation is both
ironic and hopeful—a direct, here-and-now challenge to the reader—you!—holding
the book, insisting at the end: this is not an ending. Yet nothing
follows.
The
line breaks are archly constructed, alternating between delineating simple
prepositional phrases, “When you cannot go further” and suddenly uncoupling
grammatical structures: “It is time to go back and wrest/ Out of failure some/
Thing shining.” The reader is shuttled back and forth between stable units and
disjointed fragments of sense.
Thus
far, there’s a Nietzschean tension and balance between the doing and undoing of
sense.
In
line 1, it’s interesting to note the choice of the word “further,” which can
suggest physical distance (as in progressing further through the pages of a
book), but more commonly implies figurative or abstract distance—through mental
or metaphysical spaces. (As author and acid-freak Ken Keesey once said “Farther
is a distance. Further is a bus”—and
by “bus” he meant hallucinogenic inscape.) Apparently exhausted and unable to
move into the nebulous realm of “further,” the nameless “you” is enjoined to
“go back”—assumingly to some rejuvenating place and time.
Stuck
between “further” and “back,” this charged hesitation culminates in clever wordplay:
“go back and wrest,” puns on wrest’s homonymic shadow, “rest.” But there is no
rest here, only the torque of the line break, forcing us to “wrest / Out of
failure...” The fragmented “some / Thing shining” becoming an Apollonian shard of
light salvaged from Dionysian obscurity—a “fleeting” (line 9) victory.
Thus ends stanza 1, and
with it our contact/contract with the second person, as the speaker leaves the
“you” forever hesitating at the metaphysical turning point between “further” and “back.” We read on, however; we
go further, and in
the following, penultimate stanza, we find the speaker as a child: alone, but
self-possessed.
Logically, what links
stanzas 1 and 2 is the simile embedded in stanza 2’s first line: “As
when a child I sat” (my italics). Though the perspective shifts from a
second-person ‘you’ to a first-person ‘I,’ the poem invites us to read the
child as a symbolic double of the earlier subject: both figures poised at the
edge of time and memory. Yet the child isn’t concerned with going “further” or
“back.” He sits contentedly “on the stoop,” while only the “autos [are] going
somewhere,” to and fro. Amidst all the
traffic in motion, the speaker is at rest while he ‘wrests’ the passing cars
from impermanence by giving verbal utterance to their “state licenses” their
“makes.” If we extend the logic implied in the poem’s only simile, these “state
licenses” and their “makes” of the autos must be analogous to the “some / Thing
shining” from stanza 1. They are what the child’s Apollonian intelligence
wrests “out of failure,” that is, Dionysian oblivion. Unsurprisingly, these
“autos” gain meaning only when their “makes” and “licenses” are spoken
aloud—when they are made real through naming. A poet is born.
But in the final two-line
stanza, who or what survives? Only the speaker’s “fleeting / Memory of
[himself].” Ouch. To remember oneself isn’t much of a legacy. Then comes the
final destabilizing shift: “To others I leave...” (italics mine). The
“you” is gone, the “I” dissolves into its own memory, and only these
unspecified, phantom-like “others” remain—so otherly as to be virtually absent. It’s as if
poem and poet have all too effortlessly defeated themselves, coming and going,
ouroboros-like.
But the ouroboros is also
a symbol of renewal. In this, Schubert’s final poem offers two interdependent
yet contrary visions: one, a fragile salvaging—“some / Thing shining” pulled
from the void through speech; the other, a resistance-less surrender to
Dionysian self-effacement, where vanishing becomes a kind of monument. Either
way, poet and poem now belong to “others”—elusive, yes, but constitutive; abstract,
yet here and now, because we are these others: readers hovering at the
poem’s edge, bearing witness, inheriting what remains even as it flickers out.
In its eloquent, unruly, uninhabited
emptiness, the poem resists the intelligence completely—our analysis “falls
apart”—even as the poem coheres and delights. It enacts its own demise successfully,
with improbable grace—like a rabbit crawling back into the magician’s hat and
dragging the whole act—magician, stage, and hat—with it. Schubert doesn’t succumb
to oblivion, but embraces and illumines it, and in doing so, transfigures loss
into a kind of permeance. No Finis.
Works
Cited
Ashbery, John. Other Traditions. Harvard UP,
2000.
---. “Schubert’s Unfinished.”
David Schubert: Works and Days,
edited by Theodore Weiss and Renée
Karol Weiss, Quarterly Review of Literature, 1983, pp. 308 – 309.
---. “The Book That No One
Knows.” The New York Review of
Books, vol. 47, no. 16, 5 Oct. 2000,
pp. 34-36.
Bogan, Louise. David
Schubert: Works and Days, edited by Theodore Weiss and Renée Karol Weiss, Quarterly
Review of Literature, 1983.
Galler, David. “Means of
Gaining Admission.” David
Schubert: Works and Days, edited by Theodore Weiss and Renée Karol Weiss, Quarterly Review of
Literature, 1983, pp. 322 – 324.
Hadas, Rachel. “Eloquence, Inhabited
and Uninhabited.” Parnassus,
Fall/Winter 1984, p. 139.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The
Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner (New York: Vintage, 1967).
---. Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Twilight of the Idols. The Antichrist. Nietzsche Contra Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, The Viking Press, 1967.
Perloff, Marjorie.
“(Un)Framing the Other Tradition: On Ashbery and Others: Interview with Grzegorz
Jankowicz.” Poetics in a New
Key: Interviews and Essays, edited by David Jonathan Y. Bayot,
University of Chicago Press, 2014, pp. 110–117.
Schjeldahl, Peter. “With Sweet Abandon.” The New York Times, 25 Dec.
1983, pp. 7–8.
Schubert, David. “Another
Poet Called David.” David Schubert: Works and Days, edited by Theodore
Weiss and Renée Karol Weiss, Quarterly Review of Literature, 1983.
Silliman, Ron. Comment. Silliman’s Blog, 24 Oct. 2005,
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2005/10/because-he-is-most-gracious-of-poets.html.
Accessed 14 Dec. 2012.
Weiss, Theodore, and
Renée Karol Weiss, editors. David
Schubert: Works and Days. Quarterly
Review of Literature, 1983.
Chris Hutchinson is the author of five
poetry collections, including the auto-fictional verse novel Jonas in Frames.
His latest book of poetry, Lost Signal, is forthcoming from Palimpsest
Press in spring 2025. He teaches in the English Department at MacEwan
University, located on Treaty 6 Territory in Edmonton, AB. Track Chris down at:
chris-hutchinson.com
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